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History
The Landscape of Time "I know the secret to the entire Universe and I have the keys to all its stars" In the beginning, there was a room. The room was nondescript. Its walls were opaque, like milky film, and they appeared to contain within them everything - and nothing – all at once. There was a ceiling like a dome, and it stretched on and out into a great void with swirling matter as if in a funnel at its center. The floor of the room was nothing, merely a mist, vapor. It hung densely in thick patches, or coiled carefully, but lazily. Hardly moving, undisturbed in a still vacuum. In the center of this room was a dais. It was three-sided and gleaming on its own, as if possessed by an inner light. Its glowing surface shone, but the shine was contained. It did not share its light with the rest of the room. The dais’ three sides rose to a pointed surface. Jutting from the pointed tip rested a circular orb. The orb’s makeup entwined a host of inky webs. The webs - like the coiled mist below - hazily stirred about their dark sphere. They ran lengthwise, crosswise, and diagonal, forming a tight circle. Occasionally wisps loosed and sailed ahead of the tighter webs below - but each thread was ultimately anchored to its trajectory around the sphere. Around and around and over and over each thread moved. But with immense slowness, as though everything was contained in each gradual shift, and each movement a vessel for all of space and any void beyond. This room existed before all else. It sat, undisturbed, merely existing. But, within all that existing, there was waiting. A small flicker of mist went out of place, and the orb on the dais shivered. Something was coming for this room. Something was coming to initiate the beginning. And it came. Impossibly large, dark, and silent. The Sentience moved across the room and came to rest, as if with trepidation, at a small distance away from the dais. The next Sentience, smaller and flickering-with an undulating path-moved through the void, and immediately rose out of the mist to face the spinning, rotating orb. It rose level with it, and gazed straight into a fathomless center. The larger visitor stirred, watching from its safe distance. A cold malice shuddered through the floor. And suddenly, the larger of the two was also beside the dais, staring into an inky, slow-moving blackness. What did they see within the orb’s depth? There are ancient rumors and tales. But the creator of the room and the orb was on the ceiling, watching. From the swirling funnel of matter-it observed the going-ons below. The creator was impossibly far removed, but there on the ceiling too, just the same. It did not intervene when the larger visitor swelled into an immovable mass of dark, silent malice, and a suffocating, choking hostility poisoned the room. The smaller visitor flickered ferociously. From the large visitor, furious anger and elation penetrated the room, moving through the mist, through the walls, and up into the domed ceiling and out through the swirling funnel. The being in the ceiling emoted nothing. Except to observe, it was silent, motionless, and unyielding. After a clash above the dais, a terrible sound had begun. It began as a low winding, but now it screamed like the sound of a cord being unwound, coming undone faster than the speed of light, louder than anything that ever was. It whipped and unraveled and screamed an eternity into being. The orb had been cut free of its dais, and it was no longer contained to the room. It flew out in all directions. It obliterated its dais, and destroyed the room. The funnel in the ceiling was pushed out and away, and the mist on the floor had fallen as though weighted by rocks. The ghosts of walls shimmered and flashed as the webs flew out beyond them. Dispersed, dissolved, unbound. The two visitors had vanished, misplaced by the orb’s threads. They were flung, respectively. As each thread sped out into the great deep nothingness they reverberated and struck space, and like strings of a harp began to turn the once immense and terrible sound into a beautiful and taught melody. Ambiverse "The Timescape is a superuniverse pangea that replicates, repeats, and destroys itself. Such is the nature of the Timescape" The orb would never fully settle, and it continued to unravel. Although now, it has been eons since it left its creation room. Its creator remains a silent partner. The two visitors inhabited, then bred the Ambiverse. The orb itself came to be known simply as, time. And its unraveling marked the moment the metaphysical – the Sentience - began to manifest the physical – the Ambiverse. Now, there were many Sentience, each distinct and powerful in its own right, but none so much as the first two. And hearing the harmony of time, they sprang out from the depths and gave chase to each thread, intent to control it, to master it, to ultimately consume it. There could never be enough time to satiate their desire for it. But time is strange. Now, it has become so ancient that it has finished its unraveling. Time is rumored to have grown old. It is thought that time could decay, that the threads, the universes as we know them, have been consuming it and they will continue until there is nothing left. No more time to unwind, to exploit, no more time left to run anew. As the threads, now leaking out into the void, continue to decay they are being drawn back towards one another by the Sentience’s desire to thrive and consume. As they reach out into the void to grasp at what remains of time, each thread begins to collide. Tearing and smashing the very foundations of that universe to tattered ribbons and locking each colliding universe and its inhabitants in an eternal struggle for more time.